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Fenchel-Nielsen Coordinates for Maximal Representations

We develop Fenchel-Nielsen coordinates for representations of surface groups into Sp(2n,R) with maximal Toledo invariant. Analogous to classical Fenchel-Nielsen coordinates on the Teichmüller space they consist of a parametrization of representations of the fundamental group of a pair of pants and a careful investigation of the gluing. As applications we obtain results for non-closed surfaces, which have been known only for closed surfaces before: we count the number of connected components of their representation space and prove continuity for the limit curve for a certain type of representations.